Why November’s weather was most unusual
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El Paso’s weather in 2019 will mostly be remembered for heat because it was the seventh-hottest year in more than 130 years of records. But one oddity went almost unnoticed.
El Paso had 1.73 inches of rain in November, three times more than normal for the month. That is our fourth-wettest November on record, behind 1906, 1905 and 2004.
But here’s the unusual part. November will be the wettest month of the year in El Paso. That’s never happened in records going back to the 1880s.
Our wettest months each year usually come in July, August or September, when monsoonal flows push moisture in the Chihuahuan Desert.
But one truth of living in the desert is that sometimes, weather gets weird. El Paso’s driest month, on average, is April. But in 1931, more than 2 inches of rain fell in April, making it that year’s wettest month.
The only months that haven’t been the wettest in a given year in El Paso are January and March.
For the year in 2019, El Paso received just over 8 inches of rain, under our historical average of 8.7 inches.
